After a long and tortuous process of deliberation, US Customs has decided that Dell's notebook computers are American.

Even though in one of the computers under examination, the chassis is from Taiwan, the hard disk from Thailand, the floppy disk drive and power supply are from China, the CD-ROM is from Japan, and the memory from either Korea, Japan or Singapore. The BIOS and CPU are sourced in the US.

"Based on the facts presented, foreign chassis', hard disk drives, floppy disks, memory boards and other foreign components, which are further processed and assembled into notebook computers in the U.S., in the manner described above, are substantially

transformed as a result of the operations performed in the U.S," concludes the Customs Dept.

"Accordingly, the country of origin of the notebook computers is the U.S."